How to Enhance Coffee Tasting Skills? Introduction to Professional Flavor Expression for Pour-Over Coffee

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where, while sharing a pot of coffee with friends, they can talk endlessly about the cup's characteristics, while you...

...just say "emmmm... this coffee has a rich coffee flavor!" But this isn't because you lack expression skills—it's simply because you haven't grasped the essence of coffee description, so you don't know how to articulate it! This is actually closely related to coffee tasting. Once you learn how to taste coffee, you'll know how to describe it~ Therefore, FrontStreet Coffee is here today to share how baristas, known as "great writers," describe coffee through tasting~

Describing coffee is quite simple! You just need to break down your impressions of the cup according to different characteristics, then make corresponding descriptions for each, and finally connect them into a sentence~

The Five Elements of Coffee Tasting

Generally, we taste coffee from five aspects: "aroma, taste, flavor, body, and aftertaste." Starting from these five points to experience coffee not only helps in better describing it but also truly allows you to appreciate the joy of coffee tasting.

Aroma

Tasting begins the moment coffee beans are ground into powder! We can first experience its aroma—that is, the dry aroma of the ground coffee powder and the wet aroma that emerges when the coffee powder is moistened by water.

Generally, light to medium roast coffee beans tend to emit floral aromas and various fruit scents; medium to dark roast coffee beans, after grinding, are more likely to display heavier, richer aromas like chocolate, caramel, and spices.

Taste

After aroma comes the drinking phase. We need to experience the aromatic substances in coffee through our taste buds. At this point, we first perceive the three tastes that constitute flavor: sour, sweet, and bitter! And what kind of feelings these tastes bring you is precisely what we need to describe!

Take acidity as an example. If the coffee's acidity is strong and stimulating, making it difficult for you to accept, then its description could be "sharp, stimulating, astringent"; if the coffee's acidity makes you feel comfortable and pleasant, then its description can be divided according to its strength into "bright, uplifting, lively, gentle." Just describe its feelings directly like this~

Flavor

When taste becomes concrete, it becomes what we call coffee flavor! This is also one of the great joys of coffee tasting. However, for beginners, flavor association can be quite difficult. Most friends after drinking coffee can often only associate the taste with a general category! For example, tasting a sweet and sour fruit flavor, but not being able to figure out what specific fruit it is—it's vague! In this case, we can use a flavor wheel to find the closest concrete flavor!

First, let's savor what type this fruit flavor belongs to. If its acidity is relatively high and has a fresh sour fragrance, then it's likely a citrus fruit; if its acidity is relatively gentle and its sweetness is higher, then it probably comes from other fruit categories. Then we can find the fruit with the closest taste from these categories—that's the concrete flavor you couldn't think of~

Body

Body refers to the weight sensation of coffee liquid in the mouth! When the coffee concentration is higher and contains more substances, the weight we can feel will be heavier. When the concentration is lower and contains fewer substances, the weight we can feel will be lighter.

It's like milk and water—the sensation of water entering our mouth is relatively light because it contains less substance. In contrast, milk contains various rich substances, so it tastes thicker than water. This is the sense of body, what we often call "Body" in the coffee world.

Aftertaste

Finally, there's the aftertaste. When we swallow coffee, the lingering flavors that continue to act in our mouth are called aftertaste. This can also be good or bad! A bad aftertaste will leave negative feelings like astringency and bitterness in your mouth after swallowing coffee; a good aftertaste, however, brings many pleasant flavors after swallowing, such as: floral notes, honey sweetness, tea notes, highly sweet fruit juices, etc.

Putting It All Together

Above are the five main characteristics we experience in coffee tasting. When we learn how to approach from these five points and taste the feelings they bring one by one, we can say we've stepped through the door of tasting, and describing coffee becomes effortless~ For example: "This coffee smells of rich jasmine fragrance, has lively and uplifting berry acidity, with sweet and sour flavors of strawberry and citrus, and the aftertaste is rose tea, very long-lasting~" And when you've mastered tasting and become an experienced coffee drinker, you'll probably describe a cup of coffee like this: "So sweet"

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FrontStreet Coffee (FrontStreet Coffee)
No. 10, Bao'an Qianjie, Yandun Road, Dongshankou, Yuexiu District, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province

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Tel:020 38364473